Timeline: 2nd Century BCE (200 to 101)

200
The city of Teotihuacan, in central Mexico, is established – the city's earliest buildings dating from around this time. The founders of the city are unknown, but evidense points to Olmec influence in the city's culture and architecture.

200 Sometime around now, people from an island in the east, in the Tonga or Samoans islands, become the first to inhabit Tahiti. Their journey was across several hundred kilometres of ocean in an outrigger canoe twenty or thirty meters long and able to transport families and domestic animals. Their language is of the family of Austronesian Languages common in the Pacific, including Fiji.

200 to 197
Rome intervenes in a conflict between a reformer, Philip V of Macedonia,
and conservatives ruling Greek city states. The Romans win, and Philip agrees
to stop interventions and to pay war damages.

193 to 190 Rome sees expansion by Antiochus
III of Syria as a threat to its power and remembers that Antiochus has given
refuge to Hannibal. Rome allies with Rhodes, Pergamum and other Greek cities
hostile to Antiochus, and together they defeat Antiochus and his allies. Antiochus
agrees to surrender to Hannibal and to pay a great sum to Rome as tribute.

185 The Maurya Dynasty ends when the
army commander-in-chief, Pushyamitra, murders the last Mauryan king and takes
power. Animal sacrifices, prohibited under concise paragraphs and his heirs, return. Musical
festivals and dances also return.

183 Word is out about division and
weakness in India, and a series of invasions into the Indus Valley begins.

183 Hannibal commits suicide rather
than let himself be found by Romans.

171 Greek cities that fear Macedonia's
power have told Rome's senate that Macedonia is plotting against
Rome. Rome's Senate decides on war against Macedonia's new ruler, Perseus, son
of Philip V.

168 Rome destroys the army
of Perseus and takes him away as prisoner. Because Epirus was allied with Perseus,
Rome attacks its towns and villages and carries away 150,000 people whom they
sell into slavery. Rome divides Macedonia into four republics and forbids contact
between the four. Rome takes possession of Macedonia's mines and forests. It
is the beginning of Roman annexations east of the Adriatic Sea.

167 Antiochus IV, of the Seleucid dynasty
and empire, dedicates the temple in Jerusalem as a shrine to Zeus. He believes
that this will be accepted because people readily shift the names of gods and
are willing to recognize the one god of the universe by the name of Zeus.

166 In Judah, the Maccabaean
rebellion against Seleucid rule begins. It is part civil war and part
war of national liberation. Rome, which has no love for the Seleucid dynasty,
is friendly toward the rebellion.

155 to 151 In the Iberian Peninsula,
the Lusitani nation rebels against Rome. The Romans offer them peace and land,
trap them, slaughter 9,000 and enslave 20,000. To give one of its generals a
longer season for campaigning, the Senate has moved the date of the New Year
from March 15 to January 1.

149 Rome begins a third war against
Carthage, a war that Carthaginians do not want.

148 Rome crushes a rebellion in Macedonia.

146 Across Greece, an alliance led
by a reformer, Critolaus, rebels against Roman domination. At Carthage,
amid suicides and carnage, the Romans demolish and burn the city and carry off
survivors to sell as slaves. The Romans defeat an army of Greeks at Corinth,
slaughter all of that city's males, enslave the city's women and children, ship
the city's treasures to Italy and burn the city to the ground. Rome now dominates
the Hellenized east. Rome's army finds Thebes entirely empty of people, its
inhabitants having fled to wander through mountains and wilderness. According
to the Greek historian Polybius, people everywhere are throwing themselves down
wells and over precipices.

141 After more than twenty-five years
of rebellion, Jewish rebels drive the last of the Syrians out of Judea. With
the strength of Rome behind the rebellion, Judea wins formal independence: an
independent Jewish state for the first time in more than four centuries. Simon
Maccabeus is chosen by a popular assembly as High Priest despite his lack of
qualifications by birth. He also takes the position of Ruler of the Nation (ethnarch).
He creates a festival called Hanukkah to celebrate both Judea's independence
and the day that his rule begins.

141 Scythians, from Central Asia, are
beginning to push into the lush agricultural land of
Bactria.

140 In China, a young man succeeds
his father Han Jing-di and becomes Emperor Wu.

138 Emperor Wu sends an explorer to
Persia, which helps open the Silk Road.

135 Encouraged by a slave-priest, about
four hundred slaves in Sicily revolt. They massacre
most of their masters, and the uprising encourages other slaves in Sicily. As
many as sixty thousand join the revolt. They seize a number of Sicilian towns,
and they defeat the first of the armies that Rome sends against them.

133 A Roman war hero, aristocrat and
reformer, Tiberius Gracchus, challenges the power of the senate and is murdered.

132 to 130 The
slave revolt in Sicily is crushed, but the slave revolt spreads to western Asia
Minor, led by a king denied his throne by the Romans: Aristonicus. Aristonicus
is fighting a guerrilla war with support from common people. The Romans poison
the water wells that local people and the guerrillas depend on. Aristonicus
is captured, taken to Rome and executed by strangulation. Rome extends its rule
across much of western Asia Minor.

128 With the rise in China's prosperity,
Emperor Wu believes he can support a war against tribes in the northwest, whom
previous emperors have been paying not to attack. Emperor Wu stops the bribery
and launches a successful series offensives.

124 China's Imperial University is
founded.

121 Gauis Gracchus, brother of Tiberius,
has renewed efforts at reform. He has an army of bodyguards, but he and his
associates are hunted down and killed.

120 A revival of Confucianism has occurred,
and Emperor Wu makes Confucianism China's official philosophy.

111 Emperor Wu's armies conquer northern
Vietnam and take control of Guangzhou, in southern
China – which had been lost during upheavals a century before.

104 Emperor Wu's expansion and his
maintaining large armies of occupation have burdened China's economy. China's
population has been growing. Big landowners have been expanding their holdings.
Ordinary farmers are most burdened by taxes, forced to borrow at usurious rates
and are paying 50 percent of their crops as rent. Homelessness and banditry
has increased, and agricultural productivity has declined. The Confucianist,
Dong Zhongshu, who has been leading the call for reform, dies.